Barbarian Update 2

I started to refine the details, hopefully I get to finish this in the next two days :)

Barbarian update

After a very stressful day I decided to work on this painting again. After a few suggestions from a fellow artist at the IFX forums I decided to fix the artwork extensively. I ditched the original grayscale painting after seeing the stuff in there that was wrong. I also don't paint in that way anymore so it was like a struggle for me to go and finish what I started almost 5 months ago. Now at least I feel like I am working on something new :)

Working in a Hospital

Baby Migs!!!

Yup! I spent the past few days in a hospital because my sister-in-law gave birth to my 1st nephew, Enzo Miguel :)

I think I've gotten used to this set up: I just bring my laptop along with my wacom and find a small table to work from while whenever I'm free, same way I did two years ago when my first niece was born. This way my brother and I can both act as runners as needed. It also helps that you've got an artist girlfriend who knows how to work with your style hehe (thanks Kris!).

By the second night I was pretty much useless to them as I didn't sleep on the first day because I needed to finish an art test. I was dead on the couch and woke up to Baby Migs doing this :

We were waiting for you, Migoy!

We were waiting for him to be wheeled in when I slept and my brother didn't wake me up, saying that it would be better if his first-born son would be the one to rouse me from my slumber. It worked in spades :)

Then I fell dead again.

We're all home and the kid is resting upstairs. As for me, it'll be comic book inking this Sunday till the wee hours of Tuesday :)

Work on them pages, soldier!

Work: Not today!!!

Tonight's inspiration

Things have been pretty hectic in our own respective studios for the past 3 or so months so Kris and I decided that we'd unwind today and just go out and do something that we swore we'd never do again after Habagat...

Hunt for Books.

And the book on the right, my dear friends, is what Kris got for me for our 2nd anniversary: Rough Justice: The DC Art of Alex Ross.

I initially thought that it would be a step-by-step showcase of how Ross creates his masterpieces. When we opened the book for inspection however, we both found out, to our pleasant surprise, that it was focused more on the thinking process behind the artwork of DC's Justice story. And the great part is that most of them are in glorious pencils, with comments, revisions and more.

When I got home I found out I've been sent an email I've been eager to get, and now that the situation has changed I don't think I'll be able to work for a couple of days on this guy (unless mood dictates that I work on him a bit):

Yup, I redid the colors hehe... still in the flats stage

So yeah, it was great that we took the day off. The next couple of days will be hectic fun haha!

On Motivation

WW2 Wolverine (will color this one of these days!)

My mom hated my decision to take up Painting when I was in college. She was very vocal about this and we often fought about my course way back then. My dad gave me just one talk about this, but that was mostly on how I should understand where my mom was coming from. She thought it was a degree that would not lead me anywhere and that she was afraid that unlike my siblings (one's an architect, the other a lawyer hehe) I'd be the one to struggle the hardest in life.
From that moment on I decided that my motivation would be to prove her wrong.

Let me get one thing straight, my mom was never a tyrant and never did she try to dictate what I should do with my life. I never had a "real" curfew growing up and my mom has always been supportive in all the stuff that I did when I was younger. I think it was because we grew up in a family that was very academically inclined. My mom has a PhD as well as two Masters Degrees so a title is important to her because it has helped her become successful and she just wanted the same thing for me.



Now this story is pretty common... it's almost the same with all the kids who decide to take an art course way back then. Now it's different, during my time parents didn't know about the options we had as artists and I have to admit I still find it hard to explain to them what I do. The new generation of parents played video games and read comics or watch movies and they know that artists work in those mediums so they're pretty cool with art stuff and all that. It wasn't the same for my generation.

Mamita recently retired and went freelance and she also encouraged me to do the same so we get to spend a lot of time talking to each other and I can't help but be grateful to her for helping me get my education the way I wanted it. Both her and my dad did what they can just to make sure the ride I took would be as smooth as possible even though they did not understand where I wanted to go.

Nanay, my Mom and Me

When I think about it, my motivation has changed although in some way it is still the same, it's still me trying my best to prove wrong the person who my mom was when I was 17.

But to the person who is my mom right now: it's me trying to prove you wrong in order to show you that I am very thankful that you trusted me when I was younger, even though everything you believed in told you that I was wrong.

Salamat Mamita!

Seeing Again

This morning, after long months of struggling with my sleep habits, I was able to wake up at 5 AM.

Wow... that is like, a career milestone for me. The couple of weeks leading to this morning was me sleeping at around 6 AM and now, as I am typing this at 12:45 AM, I am already beginning to feel sleepy. What got me up? A critique that I got.

WW2 Wolverine WIP

After Habagat I barely had time to work on my own stuff as I was rushing to finish off projects that got delayed. During this time frame too I was in a semi-regular correspondence with an agent who was willing to critique my work and gave me pointers on how to break into the business. Along with some very nice samples from his talents and some really neat pointers on where I should focus my art more he gave me a piece of advice that I am really really digging right now:

"Style is a collection of all things that an artist does wrong, because if everything was done right they'd all look like pictures."

Hwow... that was an eye opener for me. I've always thought of style as a collection of influences but when he explained to me that the most important thing to do is to develop an eye for seeing things and interpreting them. That is the key to developing style and that my problem was that I spent too much time looking at other people's work and studying them instead of spending my time studying real people and real objects.

What I was seeing was how other artists see their world. I should learn how to see mine and with those mistakes in the way I see things I will develop my own style which would help me survive the competition in the business.

That idea got me revved up again. The fact that I was seeing things through other people's eyes made me rethink of my way of studying and that in turn made me more interested in spending more time doing more personal art to develop my eyes.

And suddenly I wasn't pressured to conform to what I think my drawings should look like. I'm not yet there but I am enjoying the process of undoing the wrong stuff that I learned and I'm hoping and believing that the next few mornings would be fun :)